Professor Ed D'Souza PhD FRSA

Head of Winchester School of Art

Ed D'Souza is Head of Winchester School of Art at the University of Southampton where he is Professor of Critical Practice in the Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art Design & Media. He has an international personal practice and research agenda that lies in the cross-cultural interactions of the overlapping areas of design and creative/cultural production, visual art, cultural study and social science with a sustained focus through projects and engagement in India and China.

His approach is to work collaboratively with other practitioners, writers, academics, institutions and students through a practice that considers wider ideas of the interchange and tensions between identity, location and context. He has recently helped conceive and launched as Chairman Digital Suzhou: International Festival of Digital Arts, Culture and Creativity in April 2018 and is currently launching a new Sino-UK Creative Industries Hub at WSA in conjunction with Suzhou Government in China.

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More recently in 2018 D’Souza collaborated with Brussels based Pablo’s Eye, a collective of musicians headed by producer Axel Libeert. Pablo’s Eye have used an interview filmed by D’Souza over a single journey recorded in one night through the streets of Delhi. The work titled Dev was premiered at Tate Exchange in March 2018 and extends narrative threads and ideas on the theme of migration, echoing his 2014 film Dave, shown at the 2nd Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India. The film was used as part of WSA’s week of events How to Build an Art Biennale at Tate Exchange to prompt open forums and debates around the ‘effects’ of biennales held in the project’s ‘Biennale Office’.

Following on from the release of the film Dev D’Souza in conjunction with Pablo’s Eye will be making a vinyl release titled, Dev: Original Soundtrack Recording & Soundscapes, including new critical essays and writings around the original film and sound collaboration in 2018/19.

D’Souza is currently collaborating on the development of the 2nd Digital Suzhou Festival and a number of publication projects and exhibitions slated for launch in 2019.

Recent publications, projects and exhibitions that respond to social, political and cultural change include Outside India at W+K Exp Gallery, Delhi, 2011 and the accompanying publication Outside India: Dialogues and Documents of Art and Social Change (W+K Delhi, 2012), Barcelona Masala: Narratives and Interactions in Cultural Space (Actar, 2013) and the inclusion of his installation End of Empire, at the 2nd edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2014.

Recent projects in relation to biennales include The Indian Biennale Effect: The Kochi-Murziris Biennale 12/12/12 (Journal of Cultural Politics, Duke University Press, 2013) and India’s Biennale Effect: A Politics of Contemporary Art (Routledge, 2016) launched at the 3rd Kochi-Muziris Biennale in 2016 and more recently the review Timely Provocations: The 3rd Kochi-Muziris Biennale for The Biennale Foundation website in January 2017. Currently a new publication How to Biennale The Manual: Making Art Events & Exhibitions in the Age of Institutional Hybridity & Globalisation is being developed in conjunction with Professor Sunil Manghani and Shwetal Patel including contributions from professionals globally in the sector.

D’Souza continues to develop projects through Digital Suzhou working with the Chinese and UK creative industries, Chinese research groups in Nanjing University, Central Academy of Fine Arts and Suzhou University, Transmediale annual festival for art and digital culture in Berlin and a number of Chinese Government agencies.